When I finally made the decision the get Long Tail Pro way back in December of 2012 – I honestly had no idea how much this one piece of software would impact everything I do online. I knew that it would help me find more and better keywords right off the bat. But I didn’t know exactly how much it would positively affect my ability to actually make money online. I can say with confidence, that Long Tail Pro is the one tool that has made the biggest difference (by far), in my ability to get traffic to websites and actually earn money online.

So what exactly is Keyword Competitiveness (KC)? It’s only the feature within Long Tail Pro that completely changed the game and made keyword research so ridiculously simple that even a dumb truck driver like me could become an expert! It basically works like this. As soon as you click the button in Long Tail Pro Cloud to retrieve keywords, it automatically calculates a number for each keyword (between 1 and 100) based on several different SEO factors. Lower numbers mean the keyword is easier to rank for and higher means it is harder to rank for. More on that below…

Now that I’ve been using Long Tail Pro for several years to successfully find great keywords – I can confidently tell you that Long Tail Pro will more than pay for itself if you use it properly. Whether you are a blogger, a niche site creator, an affiliate marketer or even just an article writer – doing proper keyword research will help you be more profitable. Doing proper and effective keyword research with Long Tail Pro is super fast and easy. It’s so easy in fact – that it’s not hard at all to offset the cost of the software by putting it to work for you. And I’m going to show you how within this post.

Tip: Instead of targeting large keywords (with lots of monthly searches) in one main article – try targeting lots of long tail keywords in lots of different articles. I’ve been having success with this strategy for a long time now – and more recently Spencer and his team at Niche Pursuits have been using this strategy and talking extensively about it.

Well there are a few things I look for (I will produce a bonus video about this topic and add it to the other bonus video tutorial) but basically I like to see sites like forums/niche sites/Q&A sites in the top 10 along with other things like sites that are not targeting exact keyword in title/meta, sites with low page authority and domain authority, sites that are less than 3 years old etc etc
To get started with the Free Keyword Tool, just enter a keyword or search term into the relevant field. If you want to conduct competitive intelligence research into your competitors' keyword data, you can also enter the URL of a specific webpage to view keyword data for that page. You can also enter your industry and country to see even more accurate results; it's not unusual for the cost-per-click and other metrics to differ widely from one country to another, even for advertisers bidding on the same keywords in the same industry.
The WordStream suite of Keyword Tools is an integrated and actionable set of keyword tools designed to help search marketers with keyword search, keyword suggestion, keyword grouping, PPC keyword research, keyword analysis, long-tail keyword research, and negative keyword discovery, going beyond the capabilities that a typical free keyword tool can offer.
You can use Keyword Researcher Pro with the best free keyword research tool out there, Google KW planner. Importing and exporting data is as easy as clicking a button. It’s all done at lightening speed too. There are tutorials of how to do this in video form on the sales page here and they show just how easy this tool is for finding those long tail keywords.

I hope it’s easy enough for you to clearly see how pretty much any website page or blog post can be slightly modified in order to get optimized around a certain keyword. For the Busy Budgeter example – Rosemarie could easily write a brand new article – or change the title of an existing article that is already written on a similar topic, add some subheadings and a few paragraphs and have it optimized for this really low competition keyword. A keyword like this will likely bring in new visitors month after month – and Rosemarie could direct readers of that article to some of her ‘make money online’ tutorials that we already know are very profitable for her!

Recently I had a dilemma with one of my projects, it is related to ecards and many people still using word “cards” instead of “ecards” but Google Keyword Planner and some other tools showed almost the same information for both keywords. At the same time I did not want to have many words “cards” and “ecards” on the landing pages. Semrush helped very much. I found correct data and made a nice PPC campaign.
Now that I’ve been using Long Tail Pro for several years to successfully find great keywords – I can confidently tell you that Long Tail Pro will more than pay for itself if you use it properly. Whether you are a blogger, a niche site creator, an affiliate marketer or even just an article writer – doing proper keyword research will help you be more profitable. Doing proper and effective keyword research with Long Tail Pro is super fast and easy. It’s so easy in fact – that it’s not hard at all to offset the cost of the software by putting it to work for you. And I’m going to show you how within this post.
You cannot have a guarantee that you will enhance your ranking and get to the top ten results by making use of the most popular keywords. The situation may worsen when you keep on increasing the amount of content on your website. The only way you can be sure of recording success in your campaigns is by making use of keywords that are not only creative but also relevant. This is the main reason why we have the AdWords and SEO keyword permutation generator tool. The interface of this tool is very easy to use and has three boxes for text entry and you will be required to fill in as many keywords and you like and the generator will work out several permutations that produce very creative and useful keywords that you can include in your content. However, you will be expected to keenly watch the keyword generator because some of them may not make sense.
Joost developed his own keyword research tool to come up with keywords as well! Yoast Suggests uses the Google Suggest functionality you know from searching in Google. It finds the keyword expansions Google gives and then requests more of them. So if you type ‘example‘, it’ll also give you the expansions for ‘example a…’ till ‘example z…’ etc. Just go on and try it and fill out some of your potential keywords. It’s a great way to quickly find more long tail keywords you can focus on.
Great Top 10 keyword research tools list. Thank you for posting Robbie! I really appreciated the feedback from the experts. There are a definitely a few tools here worthy of taking note of. I have also been using DYNO Mapper (http://www.dynomapper.com) as a keyword research tool. DYNO Mapper is a visual sitemap generator that delivers keywords on all pages of any site. The user simply inputs any existing URL into the system and it will scan thousands of pages.
"I've been doing keyword research for years, and I can tell you that dealing with hundreds of keywords and dozens of spreadsheets is enough to make anyone lose the will to live. Keyword Researcher is great because not only does it let you easily find keywords that people are actually searching for, but it has a clean and simple interface that makes it easy to keep track of what you've found. If I'm stuck and need some new ideas, I just fire it up and usually find several things to write about in a few minutes."

Google's AdWords Keyword Planner tool is another common starting point for SEO keyword research. It not only suggests keywords and provides estimated search volume, but also predicts the cost of running paid campaigns for these terms. To determine volume for a particular keyword, be sure to set the Match Type to [Exact] and look under Local Monthly Searches. Remember that these represent total searches. Depending on your ranking and click-through rate, the actual number of visitors you achieve for these keywords will usually be much lower.

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Once you've entered a keyword, you'll be presented with a range of data: Google Search Volume, Competition, CPC, and Opportunity Score. This data provides advertisers with at-a-glance data that they can use as the basis for their next campaign. No other free keyword tool provides as much free keyword data as WordStream's new and improved Free Keyword Tool. Try it today and see how much easier keyword research can be with WordStream.

One possible problem is that although the Keyword Planner has some cool new features (including integration of the Google Traffic Estimator, which will be retired too), as of this writing, the indispensable Exact Match and Phrase Match features are nowhere to be found! Whole books will become useless without these, so I hope Google will eventually port them to the Keyword Planner. Nor do you see the “Include specific content” option, which is a life-saver for the adult industry, which spends the most on Google PPC.
Google has introduced Google Suggest in 2012. Google Suggest is typically used as a live feature while a user is typing a search phrase into the browser or google website. Google Suggest uses the organic search input of billions of users and try to "guess" that way what a user might be searching for even before he completed entering the query or all the words of a keyword phrase.

But it’s still very useful for getting search volume data (provided your account still shows this), which is helpful when choosing which of the many keywords you’ve found to focus on (although you should take these estimates with a pinch of salt, they are still useful in indicating the relative search volumes of different keywords, even if the absolute estimates are a little off).

I came across Longtail Pro this morning, downloaded the trial version and was about to buy the $97 program…seems like a good buy. But the more research I’ve done today, it seems the KC score is an absolute must for anyone who is serious about making money with niche sites. I hate to spend the bucks, but hate even more leaving money and possibly niche site success. Any advice?
Spencer, it seems like you got out at just the right time and made your money? Seeing as Google has basically stopped giving access to their free keyword tool. I own the FULL lifetime license $290+ I think is was. Now Longtail Pro is useless due to the restrictions that Google has put in place. Do you know what the future plans are for Longtail Pro to get around this issue that I’m sure everyone is facing? Or can you get some feedback from the new owners?